Historically, the components of measures have been expressed in a variety of ad hoc forms, primarily in written text. To gather and report measures to governmental agencies, service providers have had to manually develop executable code that can be used to query their proprietary database management systems and gather the necessary information. This approach is slow, cumbersome, and error-prone. Moreover, because the relevant measures requested by governmental agencies often change from year to year, the exercise has historically needed to be repeated periodically.